Minor grammatical point: did you dive into endgame yet? (I haven’t. But you seem to have a more confident opinion about how it feels to play… yet I saw no specific mention of you having dived into it yet.)
Assuming I don’t have that experience yet to compare “endgames”, a point about what you did like in both games, which was something about the meaningful/challenging combat encounters, as exemplified in P2’s campaign & D4 S0/1 (though I’m not sure I recognize what ppl mean when they refer to S0/1 & how the game was tuned back then)… combat loop is the core of what makes the genre ‘click’.
It’s what blew Brevik’s mind that afternoon when he’d recoded the combat to real-time & swung a sword at a skeleton: how does it feel to do the most repetitive action(s) throughout your character’s career? Is it satisfying? Is that satisfaction designed to last 20 hours (for most gamers)? 100? 300? That’s a design question devs are either engaging or not engaging with.
Its parts aren’t mysterious:
- the combat elements themselves, their variety & depth.
- how likely it is - and to what extent - for the player to alter those elements during a character’s career, thus multiplying the effect.
- how good do these feel?
You can design dozens of different systems around this mantra.
All that’s clear to me so far, is that in core combat mechanics & early progression (since these are all that can be reasonably compared, because these more fundamental parts are going to swing the least before release) it’s no contest which is the “better” core design given the above mantra. I can’t imagine what the rest of the game will really be like when it’s fully released, because a lot of its systems will have undergone dramatic change. Crafting & the economy, alone, will probably be very different on release.
I sense this without having dived into endgame (my gaming schedule is as boomer as Iggi’s)… just a single, deliberately undertuned, mid-60s pre-endgame build, with mediocre loot rolls & whatever skill gems I have access to… when/how often I’ve intervened to change how my char plays… and knowing a bit about what the skill/item progression potential looks like longterm (without even inspecting anyone!).
Increase player power through middle of normal Act 2, and make dodge roll have a smoother recovery animation, is all that core combat experience needs IMO… which would probably be 1 minor patch, and 1 major patch, respectively… and I’ll even keep treating early crafting as the afterthought that it is. That’s how big the quality difference in dev mindset seems to me, re: the most diablo-like aspect of the loop.
(Also, overlays & mods are a thing apparently, and inspect tool(s) are coming, for the non-ssf crowd… and the existence of ssf & overlays itself is worth noting. But as it is, you can get a sense of other players’ power with traditional, low effort ‘inspect’ methods.)
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They do go through phases of “locking” loot to a specific activity, but then subsequently increasing its drop rate outside that activity. It’s still a soft-lock if you don’t want to prolong your exposure to other boring/repetitive loops, because running the most efficient of these shortens the ordeal.
That’s the problem. The devs don’t actually play the game for prolonged periods to get a reading on the most important aspect of gaming across the board (ie for part-timers & for no-life blasters & everyone in between) which is: how fun is it to keep running this loop?
Rod isn’t interested in the answer IMO. He probably thinks as long as they sprinkle some seasonal candy every 3 months, the loop will feel “good enough”… because it’s “good enough” for him, and his is the permitted standard in the office (this is my reading).
If the game runner isn’t obsessed with the game itself (vs the ‘product’), it will show.